Experimental and numerical study of a broadly tunable fiber optical parametric oscillator

Abstract

We present a tunable singly resonant fiber optical parametric oscillator (FOPO) based on a four-wave mixing process occurring in a 35 cm-long single-mode photonic crystal fiber. This FOPO is synchronously pumped at a repetition rate of 61 MHz by tunable picosecond pulses centered around 1030 nm. It generates parametric picosecond signal pulses tunable from 770 nm to 1000 nm with a pump-to-signal conversion efficiency of up to 24.7%. Over this wide tuning range, increasing the pump power from 300 mW to 1200 mW enables a transition from narrow-bandwidth to broad-bandwidth parametric generation. We developed a numerical simulations that replicates key experimental observations. By operating the FOPO with a 184 cm long single-mode photonic crystal fiber, we achieved a broad continuum of light extending from 750 nm to 1550 nm with 1 W of pump power.